When evaluating the significance of calendar effects, such as those associated with Monday and January, it is necessary to control for all possible calendar effects to avoid spurious results. The downside of having to control for a large number of possible calendar effects is that it diminish...

Stock picking is the field of financial analysis that is of particular interest for many professional investors and researchers. In this study stock picking is implemented via binary classification trees. Optimal tree size is believed to be the crucial factor in forecasting performance of the...

Data sets from car insurance companies often have a high-dimensional complex dependency structure. The use of classical statistical methods such as generalized linear models or Tweedie?s compound Poisson model can yield problems in this case. Christmann (2004) proposed a general approach to...

Some methods from statistical machine learning and from robust statistics have two drawbacks. Firstly, they are computer-intensive such that they can hardly be used for massive data sets, say with millions of data points. Secondly, robust and non-parametric confidence intervals for the...

The goals of this paper are twofold: we describe common features in data sets from motor vehicle insurance companies and we investigate a general strategy which exploits the knowledge of such features. The results of the strategy are a basis to develop insurance tariffs. The strategy is applied...

Emerging technologies are in the core focus of supra-national innovation policies. These strongly rely on credible data bases for being effective and efficient. However, since emerging technologies are not yet part of any official industry, patent or trademark classification systems, delineating...

Building predictive models for genomic mining requires feature selection, as an essential preliminary step to reduce the large number of variable available. Feature selection is a process to select a subset of features which is the most essential for the intended tasks such as classification,...